The Mission Board - Single Server or not, its a flop.

[Shinji Ikari]

Because "muh playstyle" doesn't mean you can min-max without the negative consequences when you come up against what you minned.

Negative consecuences are fine, in fact, I think they are great.
This consecuences however, shouldn't be more grind.

 

[Chaparral]

Look, if you want more missions available everywhere that's great. I want it too. But please don't tell me that your best argument is that the game was advertised as blaze your own trail and therefore the game should offer everything you want all the time and everywhere because that's simply ridiculous.

Now we have an actual argument.

We concur that more missions is a good thing. That's not lazy or an I win button, it's a basic improvement on playability.

Having a professions focused / sortable mission board is not an I win button either.

So it seems that we differ on mission availability. If I understand you correctly, having something profession-related available for all professions at every station would be unreasonable.

If we are talking about small population systems, outposts, systems with only a megaship, etc. I would agree with you completely.

If we are talking about systems with populations in the billions, it does not seem unreasonable that "something for every profession to do" would be the structure of the game.

Let's go a step further. If you do happen to land in a low pop system, and happen to be a passenger hauler or let's say a miner where no work is available- would it be unreasonable to have the mission board point you to a system where you might find work? We might reasonably disagree that this would make using the Mission Board too easy to find work, but that would be a matter of tuning right?

 

[M00ka]

… snip ….
Let's go a step further. If you do happen to land in a low pop system, and happen to be a passenger hauler or let's say a miner where no work is available- would it be unreasonable to have the mission board point you to a system where you might find work? We might reasonably disagree that this would make using the Mission Board to easy to find work, but that would be a matter of tuning right?

But that isn't the function of the mission board, the board is there solely for the factions at that station to advertise job offers for the commanders, not to advertise job offers for other stations. Faction XYZ on Station ABC doesn't care that you want to go mining but the system doesn't have any rings, they are a High Tech system. They want you to support their faction, their station, their system, and if you can't find anything there to meet your needs, tough luck! If you want to go mining or whatever specific 'profession' you desire, it is up to you to firstly select the right system that utilises your profession and you can do that very easily via the GalMap!

General comments on the topic:

More missions isn't the answer as there is no guarantee that the players will get the missions they want.

Increasing the payout for missions isn't the answer either, as it will quickly become the new norm and we will again have to endure endless posts of people complaining that all they are seeing is Cr10m missions, where are the Cr25m missions.

Profession focused missions will only work for those that only do one profession, so for them it is good. For the rest of us who might like to change things up, do something different each playing session instead of the one thing, it would result in a new type of board flipping, the continuous flipping between each 'profession' to find something interesting.​

 

[Chaparral]

But that isn't the function of the mission board, the board is there solely for the factions at that station to advertise job offers for the commanders, not to advertise job offers for other stations. Faction XYZ on Station ABC doesn't care that you want to go mining but the system doesn't have any rings, they are a High Tech system. They want you to support their faction, their station, their system, and if you can't find anything there to meet your needs, tough luck! If you want to go mining or whatever specific 'profession' you desire, it is up to you to firstly select the right system that utilises your profession and you can do that very easily via the GalMap!

General comments on the topic:

More missions isn't the answer as there is no guarantee that the players will get the missions they want.

Increasing the payout for missions isn't the answer either, as it will quickly become the new norm and we will again have to endure endless posts of people complaining that all they are seeing is Cr10m missions, where are the Cr25m missions.

Profession focused missions will only work for those that only do one profession, so for them it is good. For the rest of us who might like to change things up, do something different each playing session instead of the one thing, it would result in a new type of board flipping, the continuous flipping between each 'profession' to find something interesting.​

I believe I have addressed this before in the OP. The game was initially marketed as a "be what you want to be" experience and then goes on to list professions.

The core task assignment tool, the mission board is not organized in this way, it is as you say about factions and the BGS. The selling point of the game should not be professions focused, it should be BGS focused if the marketing were to be accurate.

I wholeheartedly agree that having a restricted range of mission types is not a good thing.

The galmap is certainly not organized by profession, as you can find massacre mission saturation at agricultural and high tech systems.

My recommendation is that mission payouts are flexible based on BGS and rep factors, but that all mission types should be available in high population systems. Having mission boards sortable by profession does not preclude sorts by faction, or prevent the player from looking at what else is available.

 

[Zeeman]

There are two things to unpack here.

1) No, you are not forced to submit to the BGS. You are allowed not to use board at all. Do as you will. Ohhh, you want to do lucrative missions for your role? Then you have to submit yes;
2) Scaling of number of missions is something I wish they improve, and I think no one wants to say no to that;

You are allowed to do whatever you want in this game. Just this game world has it's rules and cycles to whom you either submit or whine.

Idea is that you have to be creative, decisive and you have to change roles now and then if you want to maximize your profits. That's whole idea behind freelancer commander in this universe.

I think the best idea I have seen to date, is where the player states what the reward they want is (eg - I Want 7 Fluffy McGuffins for the Guardian Fluffy Dice module.

Go to mission board, select faction of choice, let the faction leader tell you what they need you to do for that, based on your rankings.

Now, you'd also offer regular missions as per now, but the rewards for regular missions are better. So if you come across a mission offering 7 Fluffy McGuffins, and it's a massacre mission, it'll require, say, 46 kills. If you ask for said McGuffins, they'll require you to massacre 56 enemy ships. this is the price for getting what you want, when you want it.

Also, keep in mind, if you are ranked below the required rank for that level of mission, it won't offer it to you. I think one of the worst mistakes was making the rank barrier for missions a suggestion. when I was doing Robigo runs (they are still the best missions ever on ED in terms of risk vs rewards, and I have yet to experience such sphincter tightening moments since they went away), I saw the money being offered for higher ranks, and it made me work harder to get to that rank.

Why should a player that's got 10 hours in the game be with Novice/Almost penniless/Aimless ranks be offered $6m cr missions? They have not proven themselves. I'm sure the "I want my Anaconda in 24hrs" brigade will fight tooth and nail, but I guess I come form a time when earning a Cobra MK III after 2 weeks of hard gameplay felt like I earned it. It took me over a year to earn my Anaconda, and it's still a source of pride, one, that I earned it (the hard way, in point of fact, through 9 months of exploration - which *exactly* paid for the ship and the mods to get it to proper explorer status, and also earned Elite exploration rank, this, of course, int he old low payout system.

Yeah, I can earn money hand over fist now, but with triple Elite status, 1500 hours of gameplay, and a huge network of allied systems and a fleet of ships, I'd like to think that has been earned.

Z...

 

[Strangepork]

Be what you want to be in Elite Dangerous - trader, explorer, bounty hunter, pirate, smuggler etc., but the Mission Board is not organized by profession, it is organized by faction.

The core structure of the Mission Board is an expression of the BGS, it is organized by faction, the types and numbers of each mission are dictated by the system and faction state at the time.

Whether or not you choose to pursue a profession, you will be forced to submit to the BGS. There might be 10 billion people in the system, but it is entirely possible that the only task available to a player is the massacre mission.

Clearly, there is a fundamental disconnect between what the game promises (be what you want to be), and the primary vehicle to allow the player to pursue that profession - the Mission Board.

The single server will reduce mission generation times, but the organizational structure is still going to be BGS /faction based.

Until there is a commitment by FDEV to organize the Mission Board by profession-related missions, and offer missions for all stated professions at every station, the game fails to meet its fundamental stated goal.

Isn't this how things work?

I'd love to see governance truly serving us the people, Plummer's, workers alike, individually though its probably a pipe-dream even in 3304.

They have an overview which serves the perceived masses over the individual, and the power interests to boot.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

A raise in minimum wage would be nice...

 

[IndigoWyrd]

Disagree on just about every word.

You are a lone pilot seeking work from those able to provide it. Take your pick, or not. Someone else will be along soon who will take the mission.

This is true, no argument. However... I would think by now that someone would have set up shop on stations and installations across the galaxy to match up pilots looking for one type of work or another with the jobs needing done... a Job Broker, for a price, they'll tell you who needs what done, and where.

Mining Jobs, Haulage Jobs, Mercenary Jobs, Bounty-Hunting Jobs... all the legitimate work and where it can be found... as for the more questionable occupations, a Black Market contact can provide lists of Employers seeking Employees... for a price.

 

[Jmanis]

Disagree on just about every word.

You are a lone pilot seeking work from those able to provide it. Take your pick, or not. Someone else will be along soon who will take the mission.

This is true, no argument. However... I would think by now that someone would have set up shop on stations and installations across the galaxy to match up pilots looking for one type of work or another with the jobs needing done... a Job Broker, for a price, they'll tell you who needs what done, and where.

Mining Jobs, Haulage Jobs, Mercenary Jobs, Bounty-Hunting Jobs... all the legitimate work and where it can be found... as for the more questionable occupations, a Black Market contact can provide lists of Employers seeking Employees... for a price.

The big, fat problem is that FD *was* spruiked as "Blaze your own trail"... that is... a pilot may want to dedicate themselves to trade, combat, crime, supporting a particular faction, whatever. Of course there is a necessary element of "random" to what's available, and that is very important. Likewise, a player shouldn't to go to a Boom, Corporate, Extraction economy and expect to find a bunch of Salvage and Hostage Rescue Missions... But conversely, a player *should* reasonably expect to assess a Boom, Corporate, Extraction economy as a place to go and *guarantee* finding cargo delivery missions... and likewise should expect those cargo delivery missions to dry up when the Boom ends.

That currently does not happen. Players are *entirely* beholden to RNG and luck of the draw for mission generation on boards, because almost every base type of mission is available in every state, and *this* is what needs to be fixed.

As babelfisch says in this post:

Maybe we should start a thread about which mission types should be available where under which circumstances.

Mining missions for example should only be available in extraction / refinery economies.

And this is entirely reasonable. Perhaps some states such as war or similar could prevent such missions generating under those circumstances, but again, that's something the player could determine and calculate. I'm actually working on that post at the moment.

There's little things that players can determine, such as:
- Going to a Tourism economy will generally have Biowaste deliery missions to the nearest Agricultural economy; or
- An Outbreak state will have missions to source medicines

... but again, these are beholden to the RNG offerings, and I've definitely been to Outbreak states that have not offered any "Source medicine" missions, and have been entirely data courier, Wing Pirate Lord Assassination and Salvage missions. But a single board flip away, I get a board full of Source Medicine missions. Such wild discrepancy in the base mission offerings even *with* separate mission servers should never happen, if the two boards are generating off the same universal data.

This is the problem. State/Economy/Faction combinations need to more strictly curtail the types of missions on offer; it's why Passenger Missions are always the FotM for credit grinders... there's only four base types of mission, compared to the standard mission board with 21-odd base types of mission which are all available in any state/economy/faction combination.... passenger missions are simply so much easier to stack in that regard.

In this way, if you want to make money from Famine, you know you can reliably do so with a Cargohold full of medicines for Corporate Ethos factions, but you'll need a combat ship for Authoritarians in Outbreak, as they'll be offering missions to kill biohazard targets instead. Or, you can follow boom states around knowing there'll be a reliable source of cargo haul missions at them all the time.

Conversely, if you support a single faction, you can rely on providing support with a Cargo vessel, but when you see Civil Unrest pending, you know you'll need to start taking Hostage Rescue missions and the like, and can prepare for it.

That's the sort of decisions that make the game interesting for pilots, but are totally diluted by the heavily-RNG nature of mission board generation.

 

[Kaocraft]

It's too bad there's only one system and one station in the game. If there were multiple systems with multiple stations in each one of them, you could always travel to different locations until you found a place that was hiring people to do the job that you want to do. But since there is only one system and only one station, I agree that our one and only mission board should always contain every single mission type on it at all times, rather than be subject to the horrible arbitrary cruelty of the BGS.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I never played the camera issions in FE2. I did play them in FFE, and was somewhat meh about them. Sure it was fun trying to line up the shot whist 10+ ships shot at you, well as long as you were in the right ship! I always scouted and then attacked from low, make the launching ships take off and crash. I was never sure if this was game design or poor implementation, and I was exploiting.

The AI has improved a lot since FFE, but yes, they might need to make more use of ground turrets, mega-skimmers which can be engaged from a ship but can't crash, etc.

But it would certainly be something to do with the enhanced-drives Eagle I have.

 

[Jmanis]

It's too bad there's only one system and one station in the game. If there were multiple systems with multiple stations in each one of them, you could always travel to different locations until you found a place that was hiring people to do the job that you want to do. But since there is only one system and only one station, I agree that our one and only mission board should always contain every single mission type on it at all times, rather than be subject to the horrible arbitrary cruelty of the BGS.

Despite your sarcasm, this is most definitely the case (one system, one board, one station) if your objective is to support a particular faction who is only present in one system, or a faction present in many systems which happens to be weak in one of those systems and you want to prop it up.

And to tie it back to everything I've said about this topic so far, if that faction happens to be, for example, a Corporate Faction, in a Boom state, at an Extraction economy, I think it's reasonable to expect many cargo delivery/source missions to be offered by that faction, at that location. When this fails to be the case, and the board generates a set of missions which defies all logical considerations (and a simple board flip under the current mechanics generates a completely different board), that's a failure.

 

[Aashenfox]

Be what you want to be in Elite Dangerous - trader, explorer, bounty hunter, pirate, smuggler etc., but the Mission Board is not organized by profession, it is organized by faction.

The core structure of the Mission Board is an expression of the BGS, it is organized by faction, the types and numbers of each mission are dictated by the system and faction state at the time.

Whether or not you choose to pursue a profession, you will be forced to submit to the BGS. There might be 10 billion people in the system, but it is entirely possible that the only task available to a player is the massacre mission.

Clearly, there is a fundamental disconnect between what the game promises (be what you want to be), and the primary vehicle to allow the player to pursue that profession - the Mission Board.

The single server will reduce mission generation times, but the organizational structure is still going to be BGS /faction based.

Until there is a commitment by FDEV to organize the Mission Board by profession-related missions, and offer missions for all stated professions at every station, the game fails to meet its fundamental stated goal.

Well said, OP. How did I miss this thread up to now? Rearrange the following words to form a popular phrase or saying! Nail. Head. Hit. On.

Although I support a pivoting system. You should be able to search by faction or by basic classification with the press of a button. And there should be at least 3 times as many missinos on the board as there are now, just to generate a bit of variety.

 

[Jex =TE=]

10 billion people is irrelevant. That's funny. So despite the fact that there is a HUGE population, where people want food, drugs, slaves, assassinations, etc., you can't get a job doing anything but source and return. This makes no sense on its face.

The Mission Board fails to meet the core game premise.



Now that is truly funny. A totally different topic of course.

Of course it's ridiculous and each of those factions represents millions of people. In the UK, we have Labour party that has over half a million members and would be considered a minor faction I suppose when looking at planet earth. Of course, Millions of people support them but none of them order anything from amazon or need food or something fixed or delivered...

 

[Jex =TE=]

Hmm. If the mission board always had every single mission type available no matter which faction was in control or what the system state was, then there may as well only be one system with two stations in the whole game. You could just run deliveries between those two points and do every other mission type in the single system you found yourself in at the start of the game. The BGS is there to simulate the structure of a galactic economy. If we never had to leave our home system to find missions of different types then there's no galactic economy. We'd just be picking random systems to repeat any mission type we wanted at any time we wanted, maybe we'd base the location we did the missions on arbitrary factors like our preferences on star or planet colors.

We have a simulation of a living galaxy where the players can influence what factions are in control, and what states the systems are in. The downside is that we can't just get any particular kind of mission we want at any random location we happen to be. But it's at least somewhat realistic, it's what one might expect to happen if resources have to be shipped around from systems light years apart into regions controlled by different factions that each have different motivations and needs from time to time. Sorry that you'll have to deal with the economic simulation as is, unless FD decides to convert ED into a fully arcade style space shoot'm up.

That's like saying "why bother having different country's on earth because they all pretty much do the same thing"

Yes, of course high population systems will offer similar jobs it would be weird not too. That would be like going to Ireland and you want your car fixed.

"Ooh you be wantin yer car fixed? Hmmm well you need to go to Scotland for that!"

In Scotland

"We can fix it, but Wales has the parts you need."

In Wales

"We can make the parts but you'll need to go to France for the metal to make them"

Which is a bit like the game is now.

 

[Jex =TE=]

You can have as much respect as you want (and you get it from ATC) but if you show up in a poor agricultural system with 3000 inhabitants, being Elite shouldn't entitle you to fill up a VIP passenger ship with people who want to spend millions of credits on sightseeing trips.

We're talking systems with 10 billion people though...

 

[Chaparral]

Isn't this how things work?

I'd love to see governance truly serving us the people, Plummer's, workers alike, individually though its probably a pipe-dream even in 3304.

They have an overview which serves the perceived masses over the individual, and the power interests to boot.

Most people don't phone the democrat party when looking for a job hauling onions...

It's too bad there's only one system and one station in the game. If there were multiple systems with multiple stations in each one of them, you could always travel to different locations until you found a place that was hiring people to do the job that you want to do. But since there is only one system and only one station, I agree that our one and only mission board should always contain every single mission type on it at all times, rather than be subject to the horrible arbitrary cruelty of the BGS.

This is not consistent with the advertised character of the game.

This is not consistent with my OP.

Pretty much off topic.

 

[Stealthie]

We're talking systems with 10 billion people though...

Nah,

We're talking about a system that tries to represent that in generalised terms.
I think there comes a point where you have to apply a bit of suspension-of-disbelief and accept that system economies are only going to be depicted fairly broadly.

Having said that, I do think there's a place for more specific stuff too.
I'd like to see the black-market get it's own mission-board, specifically for doing dodgy things, and I'd also like to see some kind of "Mos Eisley Cantina" which'd be where you'd be able to pick up various random, unique missions.

In my daydreams, where ED actually has space-legs, you'd enter some fancy building to talk with faction liaisons to get the "official" work and then you'd take an elevator down into the slums to find the more questionable opportunities.

 

[Lori Jameson]

Disagree on just about every word.

You are a lone pilot seeking work from those able to provide it. Take your pick, or not. Someone else will be along soon who will take the mission.

Aye. Now all we need is seedy backwater bars with a well dressed Fed sitting in a booth offering to pay for your drinks if you'd listen to their 'job opportunity'.

"Well, that's just it kid; this isn't strictly legal. It's why I need your particular skill set."

"The pay?"

"Enough to set us both up for life."

 

[Chaparral]

Nah,

I'd like to see the black-market get it's own mission-board, specifically for doing dodgy things, and I'd also like to see some kind of "Mos Eisley Cantina" which'd be where you'd be able to pick up various random, unique missions.

In my daydreams, where ED actually has space-legs, you'd enter some fancy building to talk with faction liaisons to get the "official" work and then you'd take an elevator down into the slums to find the more questionable opportunities.

I know I would sincerely appreciate some commander-centered missions based on personal npc relationships.

Aye. Now all we need is seedy backwater bars with a well dressed Fed sitting in a booth offering to pay for your drinks if you'd listen to their 'job opportunity'.

"Well, that's just it kid; this isn't strictly legal. It's why I need your particular skill set."

"The pay?"

"Enough to set us both up for life."

This would be amazing.